Collision control/avoidance systems and methods have been widely used in the art to avoid collisions between two vehicles. Specifically, host vehicles are equipped with a number of sensors disposed at different locations, and these sensors generally detect the presence of vehicles proximal to the host vehicle, and specifically those vehicles that may pose potential collision threats. Many collision avoidance/detection systems are based on determining the accurate relative positions of the host vehicle and the vehicle posing the collision threat, and predicting their trajectories. The positional coordinates of the host vehicle and the target vehicle are generally determined through vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems (V2V), or radar or vision based systems provided in the host vehicle. Signals for a forward collision warning are then provided to the host vehicle's occupant.
Many of these conventional systems use methods that at times do not take into account the length of the target vehicle being considered, when determining the likelihood of collision threats and when calculating the deceleration required by the host vehicle to avoid collision. For instance, there may be cases when the vehicle posing collision threat may be towing another object, or is being towed by another vehicle. In such cases, the target vehicle's actual dimensions used for the collision threat assessment may be invalid. When projecting the trajectories of the host vehicle and target vehicle, an important concern for such collision threats assessments is determining when the target vehicle would leave the potential collision zone, and this determination goes wrong when the actual dimensions for the host and the target vehicle are not used.
Consequently, there exists a need for a collision threat assessment method that may work well with adaptable vehicle dimensions, and especially in cases where the vehicle posing collision threat may be towing another vehicle.